VISITING DENTIST A PAIN

One of my several bosses finds the following joke extremely, consistently and perennially funny.

"What time is it?" he will ask me.

I look at my watch and answer, "2:30."

"2:30?" he will say, as I begin to cringe. "Time to go to the dentist. Haw-haw-haw-haw."

Get it? Tooth-hurty? Time to go to the dentist?

Sometimes I think he sets an alarm for 2:29 so he can walk across the room to ask me what time it is at 2:30. He has told me that joke at least four times a year for 16 years.

I always fall for it but never laugh. I find no humor in things dental.

There was a time when I did. In junior high school, Dennis Hipsley and I were sent to the office by our Latin teacher, Mrs. Franz, because we couldn't stop laughing at the following joke.

"Did you hear about the guy who went to the dentist with only a dollar and came out with buck teeth?"

Get it? Dollar . . . buck teeth?

It was the first time a bad pun caused me trouble and the last time I laughed at anything that had to do with going to the dentist. I was 11 years old then and had perfect teeth. What did I know about pain? Or fear?

What did I know about the seven words taught to students on their first day of dental college, the seven words children learn to fear more than anything that ever went bump in the night: "This isn't going to hurt a bit."

Any child will tell you that "this isn't going to hurt a bit" means to get ready for the greatest pain this side of an ear infection.

I have always found it ludicrous when dentists say it "isn't going to hurt a bit," particularly considering the way they go about not making it hurt, even a bit.

They start by sticking a long, pointed metal object with a hook on the end of it into your mouth.

As they poke around, they mutter "tsk, tsk tsk" and say things to their assistants like, "bi-lateral excavation in left lower chomper" and "longitudinal extraction of the right upper gnasher."

Then they take a needle approximately as long as your arm and jam it into your gums.

As soon as you are numb, the pain begins. But dentists don't call it pain. They call it pressure. "That is not pain you are feeling," they say. "It is pressure."

Sometimes the pressure is enough to make being smacked in the groin with a 2- by-4 seem attractive by comparison.

After they have finished prodding and digging and drilling and you have finished bleeding and spitting and drooling, you pay them $10,000 and go home throbbing.

My wife tells me this fear of dentistry is irrational, that going to the dentist is never as bad as the idea of going to the dentist. It's easy, I suppose, for someone who was born without nerve endings in her mouth. She routinely refuses pain killers while having things like root canals done.

And even though I know she's right, I somehow find excuses to avoid going to the dentist unless it is absolutely necessary.

Two weeks ago, for instance, I lost a filling, which is why I brought up this whole sordid subject in the first place. When the pain in that tooth becomes so intense that I would turn my mother in to Internal Revenue investigators for five minutes of relief, then it will be necessary.

After all, an ounce of prevention usually hurts as much as a pound of cure.